Welcome to my weekly segment, Waiting on Wednesday, where I look at upcoming books that I am planning to order and review in the next few months and which I think I will really enjoy. Stay tuned to see reviews of these books when I get a copy of them. For this week’s Waiting on Wednesday, I highlight a particularly distinctive upcoming thriller with Dead Man’s Journey, the next entertaining release from the legendary duo of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.
In recent years I have been becoming a fan of two of the more outrageous thriller writers out there, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. Well established authors who have written some fantastic and memorable novels on their own, such as Preston’s awesome novel Extinction, the two authors are probably best known for their collaborative work together. Since their first book in 1995, Preston and Child have written an impressive number of unique crime fiction reads, often featuring supernatural or science fiction twists. There work has so far featured several awesome standalone novels, as well as a few long-running series, including the Gideon Crews books, and their iconic, long-running Agent Pendergast series, and there are some gripping reads there.
However, the series I want to focus on in this post is Preston and Child’s Nora Kelly series. The series follows archaeologist Nora Kelly, who was introduced in the 1999 standalone novel Thunderhead, before appearing in several Agent Pendergast books. Nora later got her own series in 2019, which focuses on her assisting a local FBI agent, Corrie Swanson, in investigating various crimes with a historical or archaeological base to it. I have so far had the pleasure of reading the 2025 entry in the series, Badlands, which saw the protagonists try to uncover dark secrets behind several unusual deaths associated with a lost Native American tribe. Filled with twists, over-the-top moments, and a certain unexplained ending, Badlands was pretty damn fun, and I have been keen to read more in the Nora Kelly series ever since.
As such, I was quite excited when I saw that Preston and Child’s next novel was going to be another Nora Kelly novel, with Dead Man’s Journey. Set for release in January 2027, Dead Man’s Journey will feature another compelling and creepy murder, when historical bodies related to witches and the Spanish Inquisition are uncovered, alongside a more recent murder victim. I am already extremely intrigued by this cool mystery, and I have a feeling that this is going to be a particularly compelling and eventually insane read. Dead Man’s Journey is definitely a book I will be checking out next year and I cannot wait to see how it turns out.
Plot Synopsis:
Archaeologist Nora Kelly and FBI Special Agent Corrie Swanson team up against supernatural foes once more in this exciting thriller from New York Times bestselling authors Preston and Child.
On a construction site in the foothills of Santa Fe, New Mexico, workers have uncovered a row of ancient skeletons buried upside down. It is revealed that this was the work of the Spanish Inquisition, who in 1676 condemned six women as witches and executed them, burying them head downwards to speed their way to hell.
Nora Kelly soon makes a further shocking discovery – a fresh inverted burial in the same place… and only two months old. As more murders and bizarre burials start mounting up, Nora and FBI Special Agent Corrie Swanson find themselves in pursuit of a mass killer who possesses a terrifying, ancient power defying human understanding.